Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

It is not extraordinary. It is perfectly reasonable. It will achieve a uniform policy across the country and allow the Commissioner to have an input into the decision making by Superintendents. I do not think that every aspect should be secret. I appreciate that if the Commissioner said something very general like, "be careful about younger applicants", that would not have any security implications. However, there could well be security-driven guidelines which the Commissioner would not want to put into the public domain.

I agree with the EU Commissioner, Mr. McCreevy, that sometimes transparency is taken too far in this country.

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